I mentioned this in the survey, but I think others may agree... I'd like to see separate categorization for e-bikes. I mean, I don't know if any one riding an e-bike will really use it appropriately, but it'd be nice to see if times (especially climbing) are legit or not.

There is a separate "sport" for e-bikes. But they need to separate "Ride" into road and mountain biking, boggles my mind why they don't do this. 4 different foot related activities, but only one cycling!

It would be great to be able to see the trail that you're riding while you're in strava. Almost like combing some of the functionality from trail forks and MTB project into strava so I don't have to switch between apps just to see where I'm at and ruin the pace of the ride

So I had Navajo Rocks or Slickrock because 'slickrock' seems to be the tourist attraction that brings people to Moab but I think you may have convinced me to just stick to the dirt/rock. The more videos I watch, Captain Ahab is definitely more my style.

Slickrock is fun and unique, if your the type of riding that enjoys challenging climbing, do it. If you prefer fun descents, spend your time elsewhere.

The best descent in Moab is defiantly Porcupine Rim, followed by Captain Ahab, then the "blue dot trail" aka Goldbar Rim to Portal route. That is a long ride though, Mag 7 to end of portal is 4-6 hour ride but my 2nd fav ride in Moab. Here is my route

If you read the article it goes into that a bit. The normal Garmin and even osm maps are geared for driving. Often having trails only showup at high zoom levels. The Trailforks maps make mountain bike trails the priority.

There is also more mountian bike trails mapped on Trailforks than OSM in many areas. They also are color styled on the Trailforks garmin map, where as a OSM tileset it would just be generic single color for all trails.

Thanks for doing this. I work in GIS and honestly the hardest part sometime is displaying things in a easy to read way. When you have so much data it is hard to make it all look good! And usually its programmers working on the data not designers/cartographers. The new basemap looks awesome!

Is there a way to make this a "living layer" where it will update with new trails automatically? Or will you guys have to manually update it a few times a year?

Unfortunetely i live on the east coast where the uploads are less frequent. But either way keep up the good work!

I'm not aware of any mechanism to auto-update a Garmin IMG map. We will update the .IMG files on our download page a few times a year. Once you've downloaded a region, you won't need to have more Karma points to re-download that same region.

Trails are being added at 2-3 thousand a month, so hopefully the eastern US is much more populated this year.

I recommend adding the trails to Trailforks, it seems most are mapped already, but maybe some missing? (screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/Mn6gWxe.png) You can edit and draw in trails using our raw yellow ridelog data layer, to make them more accurate.

If you want to add the trails to OSM after, that's fine. You can actually export all the trails in the region in OSM format, or KML/GPX.

Local Twitter and Facebook pages are the best solution short-term. They're platforms that already see a lot of use and that most of us are already connected to. If there isn't one for your area, make one and recruit people to keep it updated. You can do a lot with Twitter's API if you want to get fancy - have the account tweet from emails or forum posts, for example.

The next step from that would be an app that aggregates those twitter accounts (harder to do with Facebook, but it may be possible) into a database that's searchable by location - add a map for ease of use - and displays the most recent trail status updates for a given area. I don't think the code would be all that hard to knock together. Most of the work would be locating and integrating all of the various Twitter feeds and Facebook pages. Perhaps set up a submittal interface so that people can add feeds (subject to review) to save yourself some work.

Will aggregate posts from open Facebook groups related to local trail reporting. Will scan each post for mentions of trails in the nearby area. Will also scan for keywords relating to trail reporting, so the posts not about reports can be filtered out if the user chooses. Also scan for keywords related to a trails status & condition, if they are found a trail report is generated on Trailforks.

I still have a bunch of work to do on, this is an early release to start testing. Need a simple form to submit the Facebook groups, right now you can be editing the region they are associated with. I also will add a bunch more integration around the site and of course still need to add Twitter support.

*update
There is now a yellow "Submit a new Facebook Group" link to a simple form for submitting new FB groups to the system.

I don't know why you're focusing so much on Facebook. Twitter seems to be the more commonly used platform for this sort of thing, mainly due to the higher flexibility of its api. Registering which accounts apply to where would take some work, and may not be able to be entirely automated, but once that initial setup is complete, it should more or less run itself.

As for why not Trailforks natively, it's because it doesn't get the traffic. You certainly attract the enthusiast demographic, but the vast majority of trail users are recreational or casual users who have no idea trailforks even exists. Twitter accounts and Facebook will always need to exist to inform that demographic, both because they are the most likely to lack awareness of when the trail may not be rideable and because they will never see the need to have an app solely to tell them the conditions for a trail they use once a month or less.

That means that trail managers will need to remember to keep two locations updated, rather than the current Twitter/Facebook situation they have now. Both take basically no effort - Twitter can easily be set up to tweet from email (that's how my local club does it), and most people are on Facebook anyways on a daily basis and can easily post a trail status or just answer questions as they arise. My experience is that the more effort it takes people to do something, the less likely they are to do it. And adding an entire extra app plus a reporting interface is a lot more effort that is currently required.

This will actually be a pretty cool feature, just to view mountain biking related social media. Will work like all other content on Trailforks, in a hierarchy. So can be viewed at a riding area, city or state level combining all the feeds under it. Will be searchable and filterable. And like I previously mentioned, I will try and related the post with related trails on Trailforks.

We also already have 137,224 users Facebook info, so can cross reference that with their TF account.

If ride data is not included if it doesn't go "on at least 1 trail in [your] database" then it's not going to be very useful for me to add my ride data since apparently there none of the (legal) trails in my area in your database.

Did anybody ask Strava for their data? Or maybe just ask to work with them? With all this work done on Trailforks, it seems like a lot more could've been accomplished if you'd have actually worked with them.

We have had a couple meetings with Strava, but they don't seem to interested in Mountain Biking. We were open to working with them more closely.

We just did gain access to their PUSH API, so this will allow us to collect more data faster. This is awesome, we have been at 100% of our API usage limit all year, with huge a huge queue backlog.

We have a separate tile layer from the heatmap called "ridelines" which shows the raw ride data as yellow lines, this is shown on the trail add/edit map (when you zoom in) so you can draw in or adjust trail gps points using this data.
Example screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/3IdRQfm.png
50% of the way through this video you can see in action: http://www.trailforks.com/help/view/8/

Yes the app has been in the iOS and Android app stores since the start of Whistler Crankworx Aug 8th. We waited until now to publicly announce it, didn't want to be lost in the Crankworx news cycle and gave us time to monitor for any big bugs.

I would love to hear why you think its a better product, feedback is excellent. But Trailforks has numerous more features, I believe better implementation of some shared features, a more modern mobile friendly UI, just for starters. Trailforks over the summer beta and the last few days of being officially launched, has more trails, data and global reach. It will continue to grow at a fast rate now.

The Strava heatmap is a big issue right now. We actually have a meeting with Stava next week, and it's hopefully something we can help them address. On Trailforks we have built a bunch of safe-guards and features to deal with sensitive trails.

ive wanted to travel internationally with my bike for a while now, but i am unsure of whats involved in transporting my bike overseas. did you buy a transport case, something fancy? or just get your local store to pack it in a cardboard box for you?

The good bike boxes and bags all seemed $500+ which was more than I was willing to spend. So I just got a bike box from a local bike shop. Most shops will give you one for free. But I paid $30 at a local shop to have them pack my bike for me, which also had the advantage of getting a ton of packing material, all my parts were wrapped in foam.

But after 8 flights my cardboard bike box was in really rough shape and just barely made it home, lol. But with that said I had no damage on my bike.

The other thing to consider with bike cases is their weight. A cardboard box is light so you can fix more gear in your box. I think Air Canada's weight limit for 'free' was 26kg, otherise I would have to pay $100 or something. But if the box was over 36kg I had to send it via frieght. So if I had a heavy bike box I might have been over with a triple-crown DH bike which is 19kg on its own.

So if you can travel light and just have a backback for carry on, and fit all your gear in your bike box, you can fly with your bike for free. At least with Air Canada and the air line sin Peru. Different airlines i'm sure have different policy and weight limits.

But 2 of the guys have Evoc softshell bike bags, and after seeing how they work and dealing with packing and unpacking my bike from a cardboard box, i might invest in one of those bags for future travel. Its a lot faster to pack and unpack your bike from. Plus WAY easier to transport around the airport, with proper handles and rolling wheels.

there are a couple for specific areas like Squamish and Whistler, but not the north shore, Fraser valley or the rest of the province. plus they are just iOS apps not a website & community. I've been in contact with the creator of these apps to try and work together though.